Some of you have been connected with us long enough to remember when we were Crisis Pregnancy Centers. In 1996, we changed our name to Pregnancy Resource Centers, to better communicate our heart and services to our clients and the community.

This year, in 2015, we are changing our name to better reflect the mission we believe God has asked us to steward. As of June 1st, 2015 we will go from Pregnancy Resource Centers to First Image.

To be clear, we will still have Pregnancy Resource Centers throughout the city, which will continue to go by that name. This change is to bring all of our programs under the umbrella of First Image.

Most of you already know that our ministry is a family of outreaches. We have pregnancy centers, which include Pregnancy Resource Centers and Insight Mobile Ultrasound. We have a program that addresses sexual brokenness in the lives of young people, called The Reality Project. And we have a post-abortion recovery ministry called Heart. These are the three core programs that have made up this ministry for decades.

We have had some challenges with keeping all of those programs under the heading of Pregnancy Resource Centers. One of those challenges is that it has limited our ability to communicate clearly with clients. Many of the communication channels we would use for the people we are serving (social media, email, website) are currently focused on those who support our ministry. Not only that, but it has also limited our ability to communicate clearly with those supporters, who often remain disconnected from the breadth of our mission and programs because everything falls under the heading of our pregnancy centers.

So for some time we have felt the need to bring all of our programs under one name that truly reflects the full breadth of this mission. For the last few years we have been seeking discernment from God and asking, “What is the overarching mission that leads us to do these three core programs?”

We believe have an answer: we are convinced that it is our mission to live out the heart of God to restore His Image in the lives of those that have been impacted by sexual brokenness and abortion.

Sexual brokenness and abortion are symptoms of having abandoned God’s original intention for our lives and relationships. God’s original intention for all of us, his “First Image,” was that all people, whether born yet or not, being created in His image, could receive, reflect, and represent His life, light and love.

This is not a departure from what we have been doing. It’s simply a clearer statement of it. We remain committed to the work we have always done: offering life-giving help and hope for those facing unplanned pregnancies, so they can gain the love and courage to give birth to their babies instead of aborting them; to transform the sexual and relational lives of young people; to provide a safe place for men and women to find forgiveness and healing from past abortion decisions.

We will continue to serve our community’s churches and their leadership by offering the insight and experience we’ve received for over 3 decades from interacting with hundreds of thousands of public and private school students and parents, almost 200,000 clients facing unplanned pregnancies, and over a thousand women and men who have discovered God’s liberating grace for their past abortions.

Our communities and our churches are filled with neighbors that are flooded with the pressures and debilitating realities of sexual brokenness and abortion. First Image will continue to offer the amazing, liberating hope and power of Jesus Christ – the very Image of God – for life with Him and one another.

I realize you may have questions and I invite you to email or call me 503.256.0808. We have also provided a short FAQ guide (frequently asked questions) on the website.